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What is Blockchain Sharding & How Does It Work?

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Tushar Verma
What is Blockchain Sharding & How Does It Work?

Most of the well-known crypto projects have scalability issues in terms of the time and cost required to complete a transaction. 

The efficiency of a project is strongly influenced by its scalability. Users will always choose the network with the lowest cost and fastest speed for performing a particular transaction. For example, an NFT transfer on the Ethereum network will cost up to $6, whereas an NFT transfer on the Polygon will just cost $0.00055. 

Scalability has evolved as a major concern for blockchain networks desiring to stay relevant in the highly competitive crypto market. As a result, the developer community is working on Sharding, a database partitioning technique used to improve the blockchain’s scalability and capacity. It enables blockchains to execute more transactions per second. Let’s have a detailed look at it. 

What is Sharding?

Sharding is simply a partitioning technique used to distribute computational and storage effort across a peer-to-peer (P2P) network so that each node is not responsible for handling the network's transactional load. It divides a blockchain’s entire network into smaller partitions known as "shards." Each shard is made up of its own data, making it different from other shards. Instead of a node storing all the information, each node stores only information about its division or shard.

Sharding is used by blockchain companies to increase scalability by processing more transactions per second. Every node can still view every ledger entry; they just don't process and retain every piece of data. This means that a shard's information can still be shared among other shards, keeping the ledger safe and decentralized.

How does Sharding work?

To understand how sharding works within a blockchain network, it's important to know how data is stored and processed. A blockchain can be viewed as a network consisting of nodes. The blockchain nodes are completely autonomous entities that are responsible for handling all network activities, data, and transactions. Each node in a blockchain network is in charge of storing, processing, or managing the entire volume of transactions that occur within the network. 

Since each transaction is stored on each node, this significantly slows down transaction processing on a blockchain. The transactional burden of a blockchain network can be partitioned or distributed via sharding, which can be beneficial because it means that each node in the network does not have to manage or process the entire blockchain's workload. Sharding divides the workload into sections called "shards" so that it can be managed more efficiently.

Sharding is done by horizontally partitioning databases and dividing them into rows. The rows are conceptualized as shards based on their characteristics. For example, one shard could be in charge of storing the state and transaction history for a specific type of wallet address. Shards may also be divided based on the type of digital asset they store. 

For a better understanding, consider a large database with eight rows. The table can be divided into four smaller, horizontal rows for easier processing of the large data table. Similarly, horizontal partitioning in blockchain sharding aids in the conversion of larger databases into smaller and more efficient versions of the original while retaining key features. 

Each shard can still be shared with the other shards. In other words, a shard could perform tasks like coordinating with other shards for transaction processing. Suppose shards are divided on the basis of wallet addresses, and two people from different shards want to make a transaction involving a particular digital asset. Then the transaction could be made possible by combining shards....Read More

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Tushar Verma
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